I salute Steven L. Jones, a student at Houston Baptist University, for recalling another of those useful Latin phrases. This one has application from George Orwell’s “memory hole” in 1984 to the NCAA sanctions against Penn State:

Question: What do Joe Paterno and the Roman Emperor Nero have in common?

Answer: damnatio memoriae

Damnatio Memoriae (Latin for “the condemnation of memory”) is the act of trying to erase a person from history. In the Roman world, this meant erasing the condemned man’s name from inscriptions, removing coins with his image from circulation, or defacing images and statues of him.

As you might imagine such an endeavor is extremely difficult to accomplish. Even in an age less bombarded by media than ours, it could be difficult to track down and remove every single mention of a person. People who generate great anger are normally people who have also left a lasting and far-reaching mark.

The History News Network posts an earlier article by Edwin Black on the American eugenics movement and what it accomplished. Twenty-seven states adopted eugenics laws, with the biggest program to sterilize the “unfit” being established in California. Major funding for the eugenics movement came from the Carnegie Institute and the Rockefeller Foundation. Black shows how the American eugenics movement spread to Germany and was championed–and later implemented on a massive scale–by Adolf Hitler.

Read the whole article, but here is a chilling sample:

Eighteen solutions were explored in a Carnegie-supported 1911 “Preliminary Report of the Committee of the Eugenic Section of the American Breeder’s Association to Study and to Report on the Best Practical Means for Cutting Off the Defective Germ-Plasm in the Human Population.” Point eight was euthanasia.

The most commonly suggested method of eugenicide in America was a “lethal chamber” or public locally operated gas chambers. In 1918, Popenoe, the Army venereal disease specialist during World War I, co-wrote the widely used textbook, Applied Eugenics, which argued, “From an historical point of view, the first method which presents itself is execution… Its value in keeping up the standard of the race should not be underestimated.” Applied Eugenics also devoted a chapter to “Lethal Selection,” which operated “through the destruction of the individual by some adverse feature of the environment, such as excessive cold, or bacteria, or by bodily deficiency.”

Eugenic breeders believed American society was not ready to implement an organized lethal solution. But many mental institutions and doctors practiced improvised medical lethality and passive euthanasia on their own. One institution in Lincoln, Illinois fed its incoming patients milk from tubercular cows believing a eugenically strong individual would be immune. Thirty to forty percent annual death rates resulted at Lincoln. Some doctors practiced passive eugenicide one newborn infant at a time. Others doctors at mental institutions engaged in lethal neglect. . . .

Only after eugenics became entrenched in the United States was the campaign transplanted into Germany, in no small measure through the efforts of California eugenicists, who published booklets idealizing sterilization and circulated them to German official and scientists.

Hitler studied American eugenics laws. He tried to legitimize his anti-Semitism by medicalizing it, and wrapping it in the more palatable pseudoscientific facade of eugenics. Hitler was able to recruit more followers among reasonable Germans by claiming that science was on his side. While Hitler’s race hatred sprung from his own mind, the intellectual outlines of the eugenics Hitler adopted in 1924 were made in America.

During the ’20s, Carnegie Institution eugenic scientists cultivated deep personal and professional relationships with Germany’s fascist eugenicists. In Mein Kampf, published in 1924, Hitler quoted American eugenic ideology and openly displayed a thorough knowledge of American eugenics. “There is today one state,” wrote Hitler, “in which at least weak beginnings toward a better conception [of immigration] are noticeable. Of course, it is not our model German Republic, but the United States.”

Hitler proudly told his comrades just how closely he followed the progress of the American eugenics movement. “I have studied with great interest,” he told a fellow Nazi, “the laws of several American states concerning prevention of reproduction by people whose progeny would, in all probability, be of no value or be injurious to the racial stock.”

Hitler even wrote a fan letter to American eugenic leader Madison Grant calling his race-based eugenics book, The Passing of the Great Race his “bible.”

Here is a fascinating essay by Ed Driscoll on different theories about why the modern/postmodern world has gone wrong. Is the culprit moral relativism? the omniscient state? Or the assumption that we can reinvent everything from ground zero?

Or all of the above?

That “begin from ground zero” characteristic is, perhaps, the one that most of us will not have thought about, but which is most telling now that we have thought about it. It explains everything from modern art to gay marriage, the various political/social experiments (communism, fascism, the various kinds of socialism) to the way many Christians approach theology.

On this day 482 years ago–June 25, 1530–the Reformation princes and free cities confessed their faith before Emperor Charles V at the Diet (the governing assembly of the Imperial states) held in Augsburg, Germany. The 28 articles drawn up by Philipp Melanchthon (not Luther!) became known as the Augsburg Confession. It was the first confession of faith of the Reformation and, to this day, it is perhaps the most succinct and definitive summaries of Lutheran theology.

Part of its genius is that it spells out what did NOT change in the Reformation churches–the continuity with historical Christianity that later protestants would throw out–as well as precisely what elements in the medieval church did need to be reformed. The Augsburg Confession is still startlingly relevant to today’s controversies of theology and practice.

Yesterday was the 40th anniversary of the burglary of the Democratic National Committee office in the Watergate office complex. That event on June 17, 1972, would bring down the presidency of Richard Nixon.

I remember news of the burglary and the subsequent dripping out of details and the final whole cascade vividly. I was a college student at the time. I realize many of you weren’t even born yet. So I first ask those of you who remember it: What has changed since the Watergate scandal? Did it change the way you view the office of the president or our government or journalists? Did it make you the cynic you are today?

To the rest of you and to anyone, what, to use grandiose language, is the legacy of Watergate? It was uncovered largely by old-fashioned investigative journalism, as well as bipartisan Congressional investigation. Do you think if an event like this happened today, in our media environment of 24-hour news, the internet, and yet cash-strapped newspapers, that it would be that big of a deal? Are we in a state of scandal overload, so that the serious gets lost in the trivial?